Three offers best 3G and 4G in the UK, says Broadband Genie

The annual Broadband Genie report is in, and it says Three offers the best 3G and 4G in the UK, beating all the other main networks.

Each year, Broadband Genie tests the mobile internet capabilities of the UK’s networks on the train route between London and Edinburgh, and this year it has found that Three offers the best service.

Second in the running is EE, which also performed well in the Broadband Genie report.

Way down the charts are Vodafone and O2, which also provides the mobile service for several smaller networks including Tesco and GiffGaff.

Vodafone performed the worst of the main networks, completing the fewest tests successfully.

These tests are performed in a partnership with PC Advisor, which has published further results of the test.

It found that Three offered extremely high 3G top speeds of 15.41Mb, with the average around 4.48Mb – also impressive.

EE provided average download speeds of 2.62Mb, and O2 2.03Mb.

By comparison, Vodafone offered poor speeds, with an average download of 1.21Mb per second.

4G results are comparable. Three downloads averaged at 6.19Mb, while the top speed recorded was 19.54Mbps.

EE’s 4G average download speed was 3.99Mb, which was actually beaten by the generally lesser-performing O2 with 4.13Mb.

Vodafone performed better with 4G than 3G with average speeds of 3.2Mb, but this is still lower than the competition.

Vodafone also completed the fewest tests, suggesting it’s the least reliable network as well as the slowest.

These results are great news for Three, which also offers some of the most competitive data-intensive contracts in the industry. It’s all-you-can-eat data plans start at just £12.90 a month, and that also gets you 200 minutes and 5,000 texts.